Team Building Workshops through
The Caravan’s Experiential Learning Programs –
Adventure and Outdoor for Corporate Teams

Program Goals: Team Building, Individual Development, Identifying Emerging Leaders. 

Ask The Caravan to customize a
team building program for your
corporate team!

Experiential - Experiential learning is founded more on the active doing rather than the passive being done to. In this way, people practice the very skills they are learning and are more likely to maintain their change back at work. Experience-based learning (action alone) becomes "experiential" when elements of reflection, transfer and support are added to the base experience.

The Caravan program will be conducted on an adult learning approach. It will be highly participative and interactive on an individual and group dynamics perspective so as to facilitate meaningful transfer of learning.  

There will be lectures, brainstorming, indoors and out-door activities.  

The participants will be stimulated through challenging structured adventure activities which may include rock climbing, rappelling, survival treks, valley crossing, navigating through an obstacle course and other trust forming, team support, group synergy, problem solving activities. These outdoor team building resident programs are conducted at our forest retreat, Park Woods – www.park-woods.com   

Park Woods is a great destination for corporate group offsites. The rustic, sylvan surroundings, Himalayan ambience, organized team building activities and extensive infrastructure makes it an ideal retreat for both formal and informal sessions. Excellent peripheral arrangements and efficient logistic support is what the customer gets as a normal part of his experience. 

The break down of the methodology will be:

Lecture / briefing 20%
Experiential 60%
Sharing / debriefing 20% 

Employee bonding is enhanced by a common outdoor experience. Hierarchies are forgotten outside the work environment allowing employees to be comfortable and without pretenses. Further, adventure sports are a different sort of challenge, uncovering many latent qualities and honing others besides highlighting the need to work together for achieving common goals.

The Importance of Teams and Team Building
Although the technology of team building is not new, it is especially important today. Contemporary organizations are less hierarchical and more participative than they once were – both in composition and in operating philosophy. Organizations have long been aware of the phenomenon of synergy - that a team can accomplish much more than its individual members can working alone. In fact, the team is replacing the individual as the primary unit of focus in innovative organizations. With this emphasis on teams has come the realization that a team takes on a life of its own, that efforts must be made regularly to nurture and maintain it, just as these efforts are made on behalf of individual employees. 

Are your employees working as a group or as a team?
The following four essential elements differentiate a team from a group.
The members must be aware of these, must accept them and must work towards enhancing them in order to build themselves into a cohesive and focused team. 

• The group members must have shared goals or a reason for working together.
• The group members must be interdependent (that is, they perceive that they need one another’s experience, ability and commitment in order to achieve mutual goals).
• The group members must be committed to the idea that working together leads to more effective decisions and results than working in isolation and
• The group must be accountable as a functioning unit within a larger organizational context.

Turning a group into a team, however, means more than assuring the presence of the four elements of shared goals, interdependence, commitment and accountability. The aim of team building is to help a group evolve into a cohesive unit whose members not only share the same high expectations for accomplishing group tasks but also trust and support one another and respect one another’s individual differences as persons.  

A great deal of attention has been paid to team leadership – the assumption being that a team’s effectiveness is primarily based on the quality of its leadership – while so little attention has been paid to team members. Most team members have received little if any training in how to be part of an effective team. 
 

 An effective team member can be characterized as one who:

• Understands and is committed to team goals
• Is friendly, concerned, and interested in others
• Acknowledges and confronts conflict openly
• Listens to others with understanding and empathy
• Includes others in the decision-making process
• Recognizes and respects individual differences
• Adapts to various personality styles.
• Contributes ideas and solutions
• Values others’ ideas and contributions
• Recognizes and rewards team efforts
• Encourages and appreciates feedback about team performance.

An effective team is one that can solve its own problems, and the ability to solve problems is based on an ability to identify and remove obstacles that deflect energy from those problems. When the team members are expending energy on hidden agendas, internal conflicts, role ambiguity, confusion about the team’s values or mission, or how to give one another essential feedback, they cannot focus their best efforts on solving the work-related problems that continually arise. Therefore, team building seeks to improve the members’ problem-solving ability by enabling them to confront and manage the issues that hinder their functioning as a unit.

During the process of team building, the team members identify these issues by examining the team’s “real-time” data, which is information derived from what is actually occurring in the team at the moment (current norms concerning interpersonal communication, disclosure, feedback, openness, trust, leadership, membership, competition, collaboration and conflict resolution).
 

The Caravan Team Building Programs:

• Target the development of improved interpersonal skills and organizational communication.
• Are used to improve co-operation, improve teamwork, conflict resolution and build confidence in specific training groups.
• Show the team how they can resolve problems and make decisions without conflict, which reduces stress and significantly improves efficiency.
• Help the team see they are part of a bigger picture (which they also "buy in to") and recognize they can collaborate without losing focus on personal results.
• Enhances corporate bonding – works towards developing a happier work environment.
• Emphasis on requirement of team support and developing trust.
• Take on the role of allowing individual participants to discover more about themselves and their relationships with others, to gain new insights into their abilities and potential, to develop self-reliance, resourcefulness and determination, to succeed and to enhance self-motivation and raise personal standards of achievement.
• Help an individual in personality development, self esteem enhancement, discovering latent qualities and potential – both strengths and weaknesses, learning to work out of their comfort zone and expanding creative horizons.
• Uncover issues confronted when performing under circumstances of change and uncertainty
• Improve goal setting, strategizing skills, interactive problem solving initiatives, willingness towards calculated risk taking, performing effectively under stress, decision making and creativity.
• Identify leaders who emerge from the group during team building activities

The long term benefits of these programs also include higher team productivity, lower employee attrition rates and a more enjoyable work environment. Teamwork doesn’t just happen because the boss says that they want everyone to work as a team. A team has to learn how to work together.

During this program the participants also have a chance to reflect, both as individuals and as a team. In reflecting, they think and talk about what they did during an exercise, what they said, how they said it and how they might do it differently next time. Self and group analysis / feedback in an open discussion format is encouraged during the debriefing sessions.

The participants agree:

• To work together as a team towards team and individual goals.
• To look after the safety and well being of themselves and fellow team members.
• To give and receive feedback to improve the future performance of both themselves and their team members.

Together
Everybody
Achieves
More 
Is a motto the team adopts or forms one of their own. 
 

Debriefing Sessions may cover issues already discussed in our introductory paper above besides others such as:

• Leadership: how much and what styles (authoritative, delegation, participative, lead by example, motivational)
• Delegation: how it is best done
• Teamwork: the benefits and how to improve it
• Trust: how to develop it
• Team support: why it is necessary and how to create it
• Conflict: what to do about it and how to resolve it
• Peer pressure: its impact
• Communication: what the problems are and how to improve it
• Competition: identifying who the competition is and clarifying assumptions
• Stereotypes: the effect they have
• Fears: what they are
• Joy: what creates it
• Self-confidence: its benefits and how to improve it
• Follow-through: how to use it back in the workplace
  .

The team building requirements would possibly be effectively met through

• Pre-Program Assessment, which gathers information about your work environment and clarifies the goals and objectives of the program.
• Refinement and design of the program in line with the program assessment, location, time span and activities.
• Training Program that meets your objectives, using a combination of indoor/outdoor activities and carefully structured learning reviews.
• Post-Program evaluation to determine effectiveness and outcomes. This provides another opportunity to transfer Adventure Learning to the workplace.

Ask The Caravan to customize a team building program for your corporate team!

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